Russia ready to use ‘any means’ to prevent defeat in Ukraine: Lavrov 

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has said the recent use of a hypersonic missile in the Ukraine war sought to make the West understand that Moscow was ready to use “any means” to stave off defeat.

Lavrov made the remarks in a broadcast interview with United States journalist Tucker Carlson on Thursday, claiming that the West was fighting “for keeping their hegemony over the world, on any country, any region, any continent”.

“We fight for our legitimate security interests,” he said in English.

“We are sending signals and we hope that the last one, a couple of weeks ago, the signal with the new weapons system called Oreshnik … was taken seriously,” Lavrov said.

While he insisted that Russia does not want to escalate the situation and wants to “avoid any misunderstanding” with Washington and its partners, Lavrov warned that “we will send additional messages if they don’t draw necessary conclusions.”

Russia deployed the Oreshnik hypersonic missile against the Ukrainian city of Dnipro last month in what Russian President Vladimir Putin described as a test of a missile he said could not be brought down.

Lavrov said Ukraine had lost the opportunity to maintain its territorial integrity by twice rejecting proposals for a deal, once before the full-scale war began and then in talks in April 2022 in Turkey.

“We did not start this war. We had been for years and years and years sending warnings that pushing NATO closer and closer to our borders is going to create a problem,” he said.

In the 80-minute interview with Carlson, a right-wing journalist and an ally of US President-elect Donald Trump who earlier this year was the first American journalist to interview Putin since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Lavrov said that the West should abandon any notion that Russia had no “red lines”.

“If they are following the logic which some Westerners have been pronouncing lately, that they don’t believe that Russia has red lines, they announced their red lines, these red lines are being moved again and again, this is a very serious mistake,” he said.

Moscow was “ready for any eventuality but we strongly prefer peaceful solution through negotiations on the basis of respecting legitimate security interests of Russia”, Lavrov added.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has called the use of the Oreshnik hypersonic missile “the latest bout of Russian madness” and appealed for updated air defence systems to meet the new threat.

Lavrov also indirectly clashed on Thursday with US Secretary of State Antony Blinken at an annual security meeting in Malta, accusing the West of risking escalation over Ukraine but walking out before Blinken and other speakers could respond.